My 16-year-old sister, Elizabeth, visited this weekend and it was good times as you can tell by these pictures we got at Dave & Buster’s:


The newest Washington Spark is available online. This is the first one in which I edited the cartoon page. You really can’t see the cartoons, however, so here’s who I got to contribute. From left to right we have: Noel Tuazon’s (Elk’s Run) illustration, Matt Dembicki’s (Mr. Big) Animal Stew, Chris Piers’ (Upcoming project at a yet to be named publisher) Mundays, Paul Maybury’s (Hard Candy, artist on mine and Chris Fabulous’ Elk’s Run back-up) Deviled Egg, Jamie Dee Galey's (mini-comic god) Munch Munch and a collaborative comic by Jacob Warrenfeltz and I (DC Conspiracy super-stars) Convention Confessions. Also, it looks like I’ll have a pretty big announcement soon regarding next months paper. Like Eisner, Harvey, Ignatz and Xeric big. Enjoy!


Josh gives a little ER5 preview, a week after three hits the stands and a month before 4 solicits. This is like super treat. Why? Because Hoarse & Buggy loves you. Now buy the books, fuckers.

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A little bit about this week. This will be the next to last week about what has been come to be known as the 423 story. I think you’ll start to see where this is going and by Friday I think you’ll see what I’ve been yapping about since I started this blog almost seven months ago. For those who need a refresher, as linked to last Friday we have: A prelude to 423, 423, The Tipping Point, Breakdowns, Summer Money Attempt #1, Hooker Hand, Movie Memories, Sentimental Bullshit, and Movie Making.

We already decided to launch Brooklyn T-Shirt Company. One night Max, Gennaro and I stayed up late creating three t-shirt designs in Adobe Photoshop. We took our designs to a silk screener the next day to get pricing estimates and the first thing he had us do was go back to Max’s house and redo all of the designs in Illustrator – first lesson in graphic design, I guess.

On our second trip we were good with designs and we agreed upon five bucks a shirt. Later on, however, Gennaro decided he wanted to drop out of the Brooklyn T-Shirt Company. Max and I were now splitting the bill and in order to get the additional dough I had to hit up the parents. They lent me the money (which I’m pretty sure I never paid back, sorry guys) and we picked up our first order, enthused to sell them.

We were stupid kids, we didn’t know much about running a business then (ok, we still don’t). The idea of selling them for a small profit to local stores or putting them on consignment, at least, never even crossed our minds. Why sell it for six or seven bucks when we can sell them ourselves for ten bucks a pop?

So we hit the streets.

I took my shirts down to the Promenade during a weekday at around lunchtime. The thought was, in addition to the suits on lunch breaks we’d get a lot of Japanese tourists passing by. Elizabeth came with me, she was about nine at the time and maybe some people would fall for the whole “poor kids trying to get by” routine.

We rolled out a blanket, sat our asses down and waited for the people to come to us.

Our first customer was this really cracked out chick. She walks by and sees our shirts out of the corner of her eye. She looks at our F-train shirt which had a recreation of the F-train sign on the back and our logo on the front and she proclaims, as loud as she can, “That’s BAD!”

“Cool. It’s ten bucks for the shirt.”

“Oh shit! That’s BAD! That’s a BAD-ass shirt!”

“This one here has every neighborhood in Brooklyn written on the ‘B’. We’re doing two for seventeen, three for twenty-four.”

“That’s BAD!”

Honestly, the conversation went back and forth like this for about ten minutes until she said tried to haggle the price of the shirt down to five bucks and then walked away saying she had no money.

Everyone tried to haggle. Eventually I caved and made seven bucks the lowest selling price. Once I started doing that I didn’t even put up much of a fight. Someone would say “five bucks” and I’d go straight to seven, stating it’s my final offer. Early on in life, I wasn’t much of a salesman (ok, I’m still not).

We got a lot of these:

(While picking up the F-Train shirt) “Cool shirt, man. How much?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Ten bucks? Cool. Aye, do you have it in a D-train?”

“No. No, just the F-train.”

“Why not the D-train?”

“Because we just made the F-train, for now. It’s our neighborhood train.”

“Well the D-trains mine. I’ll give you five bucks for the F-train.”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll come back when you get the D.”

A lot of people seemed to be offended when their favorite train wasn’t represented. Which is cool, I get that. I always felt growing up that the F-train never got the respect it deserved. Everyone was all about the A train and the 2. But now that my old neighborhood is all posh and Coney Island is cool again, the F-train is climbing up to the top and I’m all proud. Gennaro, on the other hand, likes the G-train because everyone calls him ‘G’ (except for me, who calls him ‘Gena’, Geh-nah for those who need it broken down). Problem is that the ‘G’ train will never be cool so he can’t experience the high I’m feeling right now.

But, lessons learned and we sold enough shirts to at least pay my parents back but I’m pretty sure I spent it on 5-gallon jugs of Rossi Red, weed, burritos and cigarettes. I hit the streets a few more times and moved through a lot of the shirts. The leftovers I gave out for Christmas and birthday gifts and Brooklyn T-Shirt Company never made another shirt.

I would say I felt like a failure but I was too drunk and stoned to remember.